1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and method for managing messages in a mobile communication terminal, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method for selectively deleting messages.
2. Description of the Related Art
The use of mobile communication terminals is rapidly increasing due to developments in various electronics and communications industries. Consequently, service providers (and terminal manufacturers) are competitively developing mobile communication terminals with various functions to attract potential users. For example, mobile communication terminals now have phone directories, games, schedulers, message, Internet, e-mail, and various other functions.
As mobile communication terminals become more diversified in their capabilities, the trend for providing multimedia messaging service, in which image files can be attached and send with messages, is becoming more popular. Thus, in the below description, messaging refers to not only simple text messages that can be transmitted and received, but also to multimedia messages.
Data provided recently through messaging services includes useful information, but also includes in the upper portion of the message advertising content that a user does not need or want. The unnecessary data consumes a lot of memory space. Most users tend to delete unneeded messages when the memory becomes full. A user can delete messages one at a time or delete all the messages at once. On the one hand, deleting messages by checking and deleting them one at a time consumes a lot of time. Conversely, by automatically deleting all the messages at once, the user may regret having deleted important messages that should have been retained. Modern mobile terminals have large storage capacities capable of storing hundreds of messages, so that deleting the messages one by one is very inefficient.
Therefore, terminals that allow selective deleting of messages have been introduced. This select and delete function displays a message list that includes check boxes in each message for checking that a message should be deleted, enabling a user to check messages to be deleted using the check boxes and delete a plurality of messages at once by pressing a deletion key. However, because only a small portion of the respective contents of the messages appear in a message list (which may include a part of the message, a phone number, or a sender's name), it is difficult for a user to determine just from the displayed information which, of the listed messages should be deleted.
Thus, because messages are deleted without their contents being checked, there is the danger of deleting messages that were not intended for deletion. Also, if a user wishes to check the contents of messages before deleting the messages, the user must first cancel the select and delete function, check each message individually to determine if it's to be deleted, and re-enable the select and delete function. Therefore, the select and delete function suffers similar problems as the process of checking and deleting each message individually, in that it becomes redundant.
Messages not only consist of text messages, but also include still images, moving images, music messages, and other formats. In the case of multimedia messages such as still images, moving images, and music messages, the inability of a user to determine the contents of a message from the very limited data displayed in the above-described message list inconveniences the user even further.